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Presidential candidates launch Iowa efforts

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By Charlotte Eby | Friday, July 11, 2008 10:32 PM CDT | () comments

DES MOINES — The presidential campaigns shifted into high gear in Iowa this week, with both hosting grand openings of their state headquarters as new campaign staff members trickle into the state.

Democrat Barack Obama’s campaign is seeking to make a splash as it opens 15 offices around Iowa today. To coincide with the event, the campaign will launch the first canvass of the general election with hundreds of volunteers expected to knock on thousands of doors.

The campaign declined to say how many people it is employing in Iowa but noted that 30 full-timers will be trained as field organizers.

Cheryl Fasano, 57, of Des Moines, is one of those who joined the Obama campaign even though she had never before been involved in politics before volunteering.

Her main motivation is the Illinois senator’s position on health-care reform. Fasano wants improved insurance coverage for her grandchildren.

“For them, I want something better than what we’ve had for the past eight years,” she said.

The Obama campaign is getting a head start on its absentee ballot effort, a strategy employed by political campaigns to bank votes before Election Day.

The campaign will start to rebuild its list of precinct captains and volunteers compiled during the victorious Iowa Caucuses campaign. And it will reach out to Iowa Democrats who backed rivals Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in the caucuses.

Republican John McCain’s campaign officially opened his Iowa headquarters Thursday night, making that one of four offices around the state, with more openings expected. Five staffers are training to work in the state after a blitz of TV ads airs.

“We’re prepared to do what we need to do to be competitive,” said Gentry Collins, the Arizona senator’s Midwest regional campaign manager.

The GOP campaign will start out with one distinct disadvantage. The number of registered Democrats in Iowa recently eclipsed the number of registered Republicans by more than 90,000.

The McCain campaign will target newly registered Democrats and independent voters who it thinks can be won over, McCain Iowa Chairman David Roederer said.

“All the Republicans show up and all the Democrats show up — we lose,” he said. “So what we need to do is we need to appeal to a broad base of the electorate, not just Republicans, but also no-party people and also, frankly, to some Democrats.”

Dennis Goldford, a professor of politics at Drake University, believes the challenge for McCain will be to overcome an “enthusiasm gap.”

“Basically, McCain in Iowa particularly has to excite rank-and-file religious conservatives if he’s going to have any particular hope of pulling this off,” Goldford said.

Obama’s challenge in Iowa will be to maintain the enthusiasm he enjoyed from voters in the caucuses and to win over disaffected Clinton supporters, Goldford said.

“They’re angry, they’re upset. They’ve got to get over it and move on,” he added.

(Quad-City Times political reporter Ed Tibbetts contributed to this article.)

Charlotte Eby can be contacted at (515) 243-0138 or chareby@aol.com.